Perpetual Baseball 3

McMurphy, a perpetual ball player, knows that psychological introspection on a group basis is just a trick to make him take his eye off the ball. Without a ball and a bat, far from a real baseball field, he has to either blow some life into the mouths of the dead around him or condemn himself to just thinking about playing perpetual baseball alone with himself in the terrible solitude of a mind cut off from the bounce of emotion. Perpetual baseball, like baseball itself, is a game requiring individual boldness and initiative, but individual effort cannot come to fruition (without the miracle of a home run) unless combined with a team of individuals trying to aid one another and using the same bases of security in order to fulfill their mission. Perpetual baseball is a team sport and Ratched has McMurphy’s team on their butts in a vicious circle where questions do not seek real answers and guilt is the name of the game. She is striking them all out. Their bats seem clumsy and useless. They lack the power to even begin the journey on the base paths. How easy it would be to coach his team and get his players and himself going if he and his eight disciples were on a real ball field in a real game and Ratched were but the enemy pitcher on the mound! McMurphy could jump up and shout encouragement with words everyone could understand. Wait for a good pitch! Keep your eye on the ball! She’s throwing you curves! It would be the easiest thing in the world to make his players see that she was trying to get them out of the game completely, to nullify them, to strike them out. And he himself could jump into the game, go to bat for his team, make something happen. But they are not on a ball field, they are mice in a laboratory with a well-meaning scientist who is not even aware that she is forcing them to submit to the law of an evil experiment. If McMurphy were to jump up from his seat in the vicious circle and try to save his disciples by hoping beyond hope that they could imagine they were in a game on a ball field, if he were to jump up and shout, “Wait for a good pitch! She’s striking you out! She’s trying to rig the game!”, if he were, so to speak, to start announcing the rules for perpetual baseball right in Ratched’s laboratory, where only the game of perpetual reason counts, his disciples would only believe that he was crazy and nurse Ratched’s laboratory approach would win the game because McMurphy would be a case study before their eyes of that wildness that obeys only the laws of life and speaks its own language. McMurphy would show himself as he truly is but in a way that would make him seem to be really crazy.

   The question then is not whether McMurphy, a poker player, will put up or shut up. He must shut up because Ratched’s well-meaning mind does not hear any words that do not fit a programmed groove of mathematical meaning and syntax. She does not catch any words that she cannot throw back in a pat sentence that has the firm indifference of a straightjacket. Words alone will not produce the miracle of speaking to his disciples of the tree of life because he can only speak to them, with Ratched refereeing her own game, through a word processor that edits out any nuances that speak of unpredictable possibilities. Ordinary words are just another routine out. He must put up a bet voiced in words able to duck the fists of Ratched’s logic yet secretly with the power to lead his poor souls to some blessed, unspeakable redemption. Four cards are now dealt face up to all the players and they all lose if someone does not have an ace in the hole.

   At the next board meeting, the following afternoon, McMurphy turns over his hidden card:

Nurse Ratched: Last time we were discussing Mr. Harding and the problem with his wife, and I think we were making a lot of progress. So who would like to begin today? Mr. McMurphy?

McMurphy: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about what you said about uh, you know, getting things off your chest, and uh well there’s a couple of things that I’d like to get off my chest.

Nurse Ratched: Well that’s very good, Mr. McMurphy. Go ahead.

McMurphy: OK. Today as you may or may not know—it doesn’t matter—is the opening of the World Series. What I’d like to suggest is that we change the work detail to night so that we can watch the ball game.

   The World Series! Up to this point, watching the film, we have not really listened to the talk of the board because the members, Ratched included, have not said anything that comes from themselves. But now we feel the tension and excitement of some new possibility, we hear the words of a new language. We all obey laws, like McMurphy’s disciples, of sterile obligations that war against our deeper obligation to create ourselves in a way that befits our human dignity. We all take absent problems seriously. But here is an absent business that is real. All they have to do to know the sorrows and joys, the outs and base hits of a free enterprise is to turn on the television set!
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Perpetual Baseball 2

R. P. McMurphy walks through the mental hospital for the first time smiling ecstatically. He has, in fact, like Hamlet, faked madness to get out of the prison, and now his joy upon his admission to the new Eden that his cunning has made possible is straight-ahead wacko. He warbles like a bird-man of some new American race and crows like an Indian on the warpath. His words are as jaunty as his steps. He quickly turns the inmates of the ward where he is assigned—those who have ears to hear— into his apostles. He uses the ordinary language of typical American games—poker, monopoly, basketball, baseball—as the wine of new prophecy. Such games are only water outside the hospital because, although they get close to life, they never get beyond an imitation of life. Inside the hospital, where men are cut off from the miracles of fresh real possibilities, they strike a note of reality. Games produce a more robust flavor in the brain than the mellow tantalization of pills and indoctrination. The language of games is essential to McMurphy because he does not know any path to a New Jerusalem that can be walked without trying to create a direct personal contact with every fellow he meets along his way. He needs his disciples as much as they need him. They don’t speak any language that knows the words of a real communion, but they do turn on to the arguments of games. R.P. McMurphy tries to absolve them from the useless search for a soul already lost by preaching the gospel of leaving themselves to go in a direction that seems farther away from themselves, to first base, to second base, to third base, and then farther away still towards the only really sane self for postmodern man, the one always ready to be born anew by a perpetual innocent search played out independently of the rules of ordinary behavior. He tries to put them on a new schedule of sleeping only to wake up fresh every morning for the start of a new ball game. He preaches that salvation is possible if they but dare to begin to play the game that the rules of the mental hospital, a tightly knit mini-copy of the rigged life outside, do not allow.

   The war between McMurphy’s apostles and the enemy team breaks out at the group therapy meetings ruled by Nurse Ratched, the queen of the ward. Outside, during exercise breaks on the basketball court, McMurphy teaches his team with a basketball how to penetrate to the heart of the real experience offered by the game by daring to throw the ball in a basket. Free from the eye of Nurse Ratched, playing basketball or not, he teaches them how to catch the ball of life. But here, sitting in a circle with his team dazed by Ratched’s presence, he can only watch with gaping eyes while she cuts them up with the knife of analysis. The therapy meeting is like a board meeting of a corporation whose members have all lost their souls. Board members of business corporations meet to decide how to use a power that is absent from the meeting but is real because the reality of human work, of goods and services produced, lies behind the accounting figures of their discussions and decisions. The members of Nurse Ratched’s board meet to analyze publicly how to use a power that is simply non-existing. She wants the human beings of her circle to mark the debits and credits of an absent balance sheet. Psychology calls this absent government in the human soul that has life-like fantasies but no real business the unconscious. Nurse Ratched wants her executives, whose egos are half-dead and near burial, to become conscious of something unconscious, to analyze an absent business, to hold the mirror of rational logic before their lost souls.

   For example, at the first board meeting that McMurphy attends, Nurse Ratched wants one member, Harding, who has admitted at previous meetings that he suspects his wife is cheating on him, to tell why he suspects her. Harding says that he can only “speculate as to the reasons why”. Ratched asks if he has ever “speculated” that perhaps he is “impatient” with his wife because she does not meet his “mental requirements”. Her measured, calculating words are alive with sexual innuendo. He answers that the only thing he can truly speculate about is the very existence of his life, with or without his wife. But he is unable to keep the focus of the group away from his relations with his wife because others interrupt with snickers expressing more sexual innuendo. Harding himself suddenly uses the word “peculiar” and the word flies wildly among fellow members of the cuckoo board, causing alarm. He bravely insists that being “peculiar” is not the problem: “I’m not just talking about my wife. I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person. I’m talking about everybody. I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven. Do you understand finally?” But under the stare of Ratched and with the hubbub of the cuckoo group, without the bounce of action and reaction to add rhyme to their reasoning, his words float by without effect. The truth risks becoming a feather unless it becomes a man. Harding’s mental health requires the courage of his accepting his being’s uniqueness, whatever it may be, as a vital and necessary element of his personality that need not be subject to anyone’s analysis. By putting himself in the position of being judged “peculiar” by a group, he turns himself into a defenseless object out of touch with a wholesome inner experience of his uniqueness. Ratched’s weapon against the mental health of being unique is the fist of two plus two equals four. She urges them to speak freely because getting talk of peculiarities out in the open under the gun of rationality produces the fission between mind and soul that reveals the world of guilt. The innocence of our experience is routinely destroyed when the mind, detached, dictates that every experience is necessarily good or evil. Ratched wants her patients to analyze what they are rather than be who they are. Being unique, from the point of view of rational knowledge, can only be a fault that must be corrected for if it is a genuine element of being then it means anything may be, no one’s peculiarity should be ruled out because it does not fit some abstract rational standard. Ratched wants them to do the rational tail chasing of all losers. She wants them to confess in public the sin of not being just like everyone else.

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Perpetual Baseball 1

The first prophet of baseball appeared in 1975 in the film masterpiece, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey, the author of the book of the same title, owns the glory of having created the character who in the film reaches dimensions that make him the world’s first perpetual baseball player. His hero, Randall Patrick McMurphy, gets loose from handcuffs and in a mental hospital in the state of Oregon, where most of the action takes place, walks on a new moon. A west coast cowboy without a horse sounds the soul of a new and dangerous California in a tragedy that is, in the film version, the equal in power to anything in ancient Greek tragedy. Since the Civil War, the Europeanized minds of most American writers and artists who tried to revive the American soul only dug more holes or planted the ground with foreign seed. When Randall P. McMurphy gets loose from his handcuffs, the soul of America pounded into the ground at Gettysburg, which baseball preserved in a muted and disguised form, rises again fresh and true and shows the world how to walk tall on a new deadly ground. McMurphy leaves one location, a prison, wins a base in a different place, a mental hospital, struggles there against an organized group of enemies trying to pacify him, tries to escape and fails, but by his out allows a friend, a member of his team, to escape. The art of the film imitates the art of baseball. A tragic hero lives out a destiny routinely possible in any baseball game.

   When the guards delivering McMurphy from the prison to the mental hospital release him, he gets a new chance to step up to the plate. The new life he can create for himself will be full of risks because although his new environment has a measure of freedom, it will be the unrelenting mission of the group of enemies all around him, the women nurses and the men guards, to shut him up and turn him to stone. The confrontation with the pitcher takes the form, near the beginning of the film, of an interview with the head of the hospital, a psychiatrist. He is an intelligent, scientific humanist who, if he does not yet know all the laws of human behavior, at least is certain that all human behavior must obey laws. His business is to decide who is sane and who is insane, who is worthy to play the rigged game and who is not worthy. Like every pitcher he hates the sudden spontaneity of a base hit and his science is devoted to eliminating all home runs from the universe. McMurphy wants to get by him and be admitted to the mental hospital because life among the mentally ill seems a paradise after the handcuffs and the prison he has just left. To get on base in the psychiatrist’s prison seems at the worst an easy intermediary trip to full freedom. Like all ball players, McMurphy is sure that the only way back home is to first get on base. He has more than enough wit to handle the psychiatrist’s curves and he does earn a base in the cuckoo’s nest where he will be observed to decide if he is normal.

   He is, but his normalcy borders on madness because he has an innocent and fierce wind in the soul that blows where it will. He has enough discipline and reason to set his sails and steer his ship, but he obeys no law except the imperative to be born again with each new tug of the universe on his mast. He is a new Christ admitted to an evil world for a new crucifixion. He is insane because his humanity violates the rules of the rigged game. He is judged a social misfit because he will not sit down and quietly obey his enemies like a vegetable. He has the stiff, self-reliant hardness of a Ty Cobb. He is ready to steal any base in any ball game at any time against any team. Yet he is a new cowboy, not the old sort, usually on a horse above the ground with the glamour and god-like detachment of the sun. The old cowboys got off their horses mostly to punish now and then a few wild western men who disobeyed the law. Randall McMurphy is against any law that cannot prove on the spot its necessity by showing a man some new possibility for life. Like Achelous, the Greek river God, who turned himself from a man back to a river in order to squirt away from the grip of Hercules during a wrestling contest, McMurphy is a new cowboy because he has his eye on not just what is possible. He is not just ready to steal bases. The law allows that. He is ready to try to go all the way home at any moment. His boldness will send him off and running from first base for the plate on just a base hit like Enos Slaughter who scored from first base on a base hit to win the 1946 World Series. He is as innocent as Jesus, as self-reliant as Ty Cobb, and as bold as Enos Slaughter. He is too dangerous to be let out of the mental hospital. He has to be specialized, one way or another, so that he learns to live only according to predetermined models of behavior. Experts in the necessary laws of behavior must operate on him. He must be forced to stand passively touching a base and not be allowed to run freely around the bases.

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The End of All Beginnings 3

Anita had sized up Robert Dolan at their first meeting on a parent’s night at his high school. He did nothing to her as a man. He struck her as too tame and too good. He did not give off as he talked to her the kind of bold rough undertone that the voices of real men give off. Anita’s search for mister right was a hunt. A man’s presence had to make her feel he was a bold hunter looking for game before she gave him back a sign that she was game.

   Ursula opened the door for her mother and Rachel. She kissed her mother’s left cheek and closed the door behind them. They took a few steps into Robert Dolan’s apartment and looked about. Anita Ridley was an attractive woman of forty-six with a slim figure and a height and carriage that resembled her daughters. Robert went up to her and offered his hand. The two shook hands.

   “How are you, Anita?” asked Robert. “I’m happy to see you. Have a seat.”

   Robert waved towards the sofa and Anita sat near one end. Robert sat at the other end and looked at Anita.

   “Ursula and I have found happiness and peace together,” he said. “We wish the same for you and Rachel.”

   “I’m not happy,” said Anita Ridley, “and I won’t be at peace until you give me back my daughter.”

   “I’m not holding her against her will. She’s free to leave.”

   “Do you want her to leave?”

   “No.”

   “Then you’re holding her here. You’ve found some way to control her and keep her here against her will.”

   “I’m here because I want to be here,” said Ursula strongly.

   “You’re not. You’re here against your will if you’ve started a relationship with an old man. A girl doesn’t normally do that.”

   “I won’t leave,” said Ursula in a stronger voice, almost yelling. “You won’t make me leave.” But her voice broke and she was near tears. “You don’t understand me,” she said in a softer voice, trying to hold back her tears. “I’m happy.”

   “You can’t be happy living with a seventy-year-old man,” said Rachel.

   “Come home with me and let me take care of you,” said Anita. “I only want what’s best for you.”

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The End of All Beginnings 2

Anita's latest relationship was with Charles Balch. He had won six months ago $450,000 in damages from the Federal Government in a suit that had been brought against him alleging fraud in money he managed as an administrator of government contracts. He had bought a luxury yacht with the money the court awarded him and had been entertaining Anita on it all summer. Charles Balch fit with Anita’s standards and breaking with him had been difficult because financially and sexually he was definitely a mister right. Anita discovered however that he was incapable of resisting other women. When they were at restaurants, he sometimes gawked at attractive women. A few days before a scheduled week-long trip with him to Paris, she found out that he had been spending time on his yacht with another woman. Anita decided to enjoy in his company all the pleasures available to her by accompanying him to Paris. Charles was a well built man who lifted weights and rowed regularly on the Charles River. His lovemaking in Paris was qualitatively on a par with her former husband and although she had sighed emotionally remembering their bouts of sex in Paris, she dropped him with a short note over the internet as soon as they were back in Boston.

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The End of All Beginnings 1

Six years ago when her husband told her he was leaving her, Anita Ridley had been shocked.  But as time went by she adjusted to her changed circumstances and began enjoying being free to date men. She still believed that the good life meant one man joined faithfully to one woman. Even as she searched for new relationships on the internet and gave herself to some men after carefully eliminating others, she still believed she was searching for mister right and ready to make another marriage. The father of Ursula and Rachel, Upton Ridley, had lived up fully to the standards she used to judge men both by his successful behavior among other men in business and by his performance with her in their bedroom. Upton had fallen in love with Marya Buttridge, a twenty-six- year-old married beauty. Marya fired Anita with hatred and jealousy but in the end she understood her husband’s actions. Upton Ridley attracted women and Anita had reasoned finally that the same quality in Upton that had aroused her love had made a beautiful young woman yield to him and there had been little Upton could do but also yield. He provided income regularly for her and their daughters and she was often in contact with him making plans and decisions regarding Ursula and Rachel’s  future. Upton’s masculinity remained the standard she used to judge the men she began dating and accepted into her bed. She was a church member who sang in a choral group at her church but the life of excitement and pleasures that Upton had released her to enjoy did not trouble her morally. She had been a faithful wife and  had fully enjoyed the pleasures of marriage. She had no moral problem seeking the same pleasures with new men that Marya Buttridge, a twenty-six-year-old beauty, had taken from her. The main thing was that she was always still looking for mister right even though in the six years that she had been divorced, she had been intimate with four men.

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The Mystery of American Nationalism

American nationalism is a mystery because like a mystery it has no clear basis in fact. The North American continent has produced empires here and there but never any cut and dry state  on its own with its own language and borders and an army to defend it like European nations. New England got up on its own an army and fought the British army in its fields but it soon had to rely on aid from other colonies and France to survive and win independence. Then it’s 4 states gave up their independent sovereignty and joined 9 other former colonies to form a union of states. Abraham Lincoln turned the conflict over whether or not to extend slavery to new western states into a war and changed a union of states into a quasi-empire. 20 million immigrants from Europe who could not speak English then arrived and decided with scant knowledge of American history that they were in a nation like the ones they had abandoned to make money. Most of their aged and disgruntled grandchildren and great grandchildren who had never lived for their entire lives in a nation voted for Donald Trump. He is now the leading politician in a gigantic blob of well-paid bureaucrats and elected representatives in charge of hundreds of departments, agencies and commissions financed with such an enormous supply of thousands of billions of dollars that it is positively scary both whether they rule a nation or they don’t. They have a large military and a great supply of hydrogen bombs and that makes Washington for every foreign state a state even though it is not a state, is not located in a state and has no legal or political power over people living in any national territory. So the mystery endures. American nationalism has no basis in fact but it is alive and full of a new passionate energy to make America great again. Donald Trump is it’s national leader.

Daniel McNeill

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